


The Warlord Era

by blexluthor



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bandits & Outlaws, Gen, Internal Monologue, Rebels, Vignette, Villains
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-11 20:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blexluthor/pseuds/blexluthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hundred Year War has ended and the world had a chance for peace, but it did not take it. When it came time for generals and rebels to hand back the piece of the world they had defended for a century, they said no. Whether for greed or anger or fear or any other muse that might inspire them, it doesn't matter. Their reasons are their own, their actions changed history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Legacy

**Author's Note:**

> To provide some context, this chapter is set about 39 years after the series finale of AtLA and 31 years before LoK. More generally, these vignettes are set in a post-war world of my creation where amid the chaos and uncertainty of transition warlords, gangsters, rebels, and the like struggle with and against each other to carve a place for themselves in the new world. Each chapter in this story will focus on a different man or woman who made their mark on the world during these wild and wicked times. I have tried to remain as true to canon and Word of God as possible in creating this, but by virtue of it being set between series in what might be thought of as a canonical blank space, a lot of what you read about the setting and events will spring from my mind rather than the creators'.

  
**Legacy** _  
_   


_Shé 04, 139 ASC_

My mind turns more and more to the legacy I will leave. Ever since the men brought that physician from one of our villages in to look at me, these thoughts have consumed me. I will die soon. I've been a soldier my whole life. I should have died in battle more times than I care to count. I cannot help but find it amusing that the death of me will be living too long. I have outlasted wars, armies, dynasties, and now my own heart. I have seen death scrape by me and take the next man instead. Now at last we are sitting down. Death and I. Looking each other eye-to-eye before we walk off together.

I do not fear death. Truly. But I look back on the years and I feel a terror that mortality never brought. We all live our lives knowing we will die. We do not all die knowing the world will look back at our lives with loathing. I will not even be able to defend myself. Today I am a controversy. Tomorrow, without the context of today, how can anyone look at what I've done and see anything less than a monster? Not just I, but all of us? Will we not be remembered as a plague on the world?

I don't doubt that we will be blamed, that is assured already. They will blame us, some of us blames ourselves, and perhaps you will blame us as well. But do we really deserve it? Maybe I am but an old man trying to wash myself of the dirt of the past. But maybe not. I cannot say. After all, who does not wish to die with a clear conscience and a light heart? I would like to believe I'd not let such a fleeting and empty solace taint my last thoughts to myself and words to the world, but I have grown old and with that comes fatigue and fear.

I have never been one to deny responsibility for my actions to save face. I accepted culpability for Zhao and the life I misspent serving the Fire Lord's ambitions. I also know that in some small way I am responsible for Avatar Aang ending decades of pointless war. The irony is not lost on me. I helped the pup who ended the war and now what am I? What do they call me? Warlord. I believed with the Phoenix King gone I would never have to use the blade or the flame again. But I digress. My sole comfort, cold it may be, is that I have never been the sort to shirk my accountability. It is the only hope that what I say here has some piece of the truth in it. I can trust nothing anymore. My heart is weary and weak, my mind is falling out of my head one memory at a time, my men are consumed by their own greed and fanaticism. All I can trust is the man I once was. I remember him. Pieces of him. The protector. The firebrand. The mentor. The recluse. I started this journal, this record of my thoughts and beliefs, this ledger of my crimes and repentances, just before my desertion. My first desertion. I have been fortunate enough to remain the same fierce, honorable man in here at least, even as time has left me wizened and embittered, tempted and corrupted. I do not deserve the blessing of that man I once called myself writing for me any longer, but I ask for it still.

I have gone off topic. I have babbled. It grows harder and harder to keep my mind on course. It meanders, stumbles, forgets and every day I awake knowing that it will be worse than the day before. No matter.

These past forty years and beyond will be laid at our feet like the kill after a hunt. Perhaps that is all we are. Hunters. Archers with dogs at our fore and trumpeters at our backs chasing down a feast. We caught victory, wealth, and power. We supped on each to our hearts' content. Now the table holds nothing but this most bitter fare. It will be fed to us and we will have no choice but to down it.

Everyone tried for what we six titans had, but their failures will redeem them. I know this. They will not be remembered. They will not be reviled. They each took a ration and fell in line when they were told. We were too proud, too strong, and too foolish to drink of such weak tea.

We were born in war. All of us. A century of fighting and killing. You live in peacetime, if you're lucky you might thrive. But wartime? You survive in wartime. What can be expected? What can come of a world that hasn't lived for a hundred years? It was all we knew, it is all we know. After the mad king fell, we had the freedom to live again, but could only remember how to survive. It was chaos. Chaos and opportunity. The Earth King was a puppet without his strings and too inept by half to run his own bedchamber without throwing the realm into crisis. The Fire Lord was young, untested, and trying to rule a country he hadn't called home in years. The Water Tribes were content to close themselves to the world and lick their wounds. Everyone was busy. Everyone was tired. The heroes and the sovereigns were so preoccupied with fixing the center, they never looked to what we were doing at the margins.

It was there. The lot of it. Nigh unguarded. Of course we took everything we could. The all of us. Lords from storied families. Pirate kings with nothing but guile and gall. Revolutionaries with lofty ideals in their hearts and rusty blades in their hands. Admirals who have fought for too long. To think I started this new age their enemy, Jeong Jeong the rebellion breaker and the bandit's bane. Now I am Jeong Jeong the Fallen, tyrant and thief.

Can we be blamed? Everyone wanted what we had, what we have. Are we guilty only of winning? The Fire Colonials did just as we did and now the Republic of Nations is a glistening jewel of unity and harmony. Perhaps it is because we were never given permission. We took all we could carry. We didn't say please or thank you. We saw what we wanted. We took it. We damned you to try to make us let go. Our crime was defiance and you will do with the history book what you never could with all your armies and assassins and ships.

I shudder to see these words fall from my pen. I truly feel a weak, old man, too proud to admit his own avarice and foolishness. Still, I sought to write my thoughts before I forget them, all of them. We committed atrocities. I committed them. I believed I was in the right the whole time. Perhaps I was, but it no longer matters. We did the only thing that made sense. The only thing that could make sense to people forged in violence and war. We did it well.

All of our other compatriots have left us. Their holdings fell to weak successors, overextended armies, and well bought blades in the night. Their fiefdoms were eaten up by anyone close enough to throw lives at them. The game that once included every soldier and hatchetman with the audacity to play was worn down to six. The six. Abandoned as I am by my superiors, my country, and the White Lotus; they and my Damned battalion are my only comrades. Perhaps this is fate. Or perhaps our tales are nothing but a confluence of circumstance, chance, and geography. I cannot say. It is irrelevant. We succeeded where everyone else failed. We shaped history just as history shaped us. For that we must be punished. Or perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps if we had taken more, we would be the heroes of this epoch rather than the villains. Even if we could change our stories, I am too old, too tired. I await the end of this tale with bated breath.

I want to say more while my mind can still hold these thoughts, but the sun is rising and I have much to attend to. I turn a hundred today and the men will want to celebrate.


	2. Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two quick warnings: this chapter is OC-centric and I make use of a lot of made up slang here. My hope is that context helps explain most of it, but if a translation is needed just ask and ye shall receive.
> 
> For some context, this chapter takes place within a year of the AtLA series finale. Also, an amazing amount of the AtLA world has gone unnamed and unexplored in the canon. I've taken advantage of this by making up a lot of my own places, so fair warning there too.

**Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster**

_101 ASC_

You can tell by my everyday fits that I ain't rich. I'm just another zinaman caught up in the mix. Trying to take your gold and your copper bits. Yeah, yeah, that's me.

    See, I'm the bad guy, understand? That ain't never phased me though. Even still, being the bad guy and all, I couldn't help but see the irony of finding myself on my knees before the Avatar, accepting his accolades for my, what was it, "commendable service during the war". Weren't just the nomad neither. Earth King What's-His-Name be standing to his right and the charred dragon princeling to his left. Look at these goody-goody fools congratulating me, calling me an unsung hero, a benison to all of Mo Ce Shi. I'm not entirely sure what a "benison" is, but I can tell by the way Lord Beads-and-Glasses said it that it most probably don't apply to me. You hear them tell it, I personally was the only thing standing between every man and woman with a bit of green in their eyes from all the fires across the pond. Then again, for all I know, maybe I was.

    Look at 'em all, actors. Kowtowing and glad-handing. Acting like I ain't every bit a smuggler and extortionist. Acting like they wouldn't be sending me on a magistrate mandated vacation out to Koh Tralach for the same "heroism" they're honoring me for now. Wouldn't be no mentionable difference between them and the dragons but the color of the banners. I'd be the same, city'd be the same, they'd be the same sans a few sideburns. The only real change is I'd be called a villain then, not a hero. Might sound odd for a man in my position to say, but I got myself respect for heroes. Heroes don't live happy lives most times. Not long ones neither. Being a hero means laying yourself down so others don't have to. Even a lowdown Pig Pen hustler like myself can admire that. I might rethink my position on heroes now that I know the title can be had with a turning of the color wheel.

    Maybe this little cenobite don't know. Some of them, one of them at least, have got to know. Maybe they all know and they just think I'm going to stop now. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. They be thinking I was defying the Fire Nation because it was the Fire Nation. That might could be. But have they consider that I might just be defiant? Oh no, it's all so simple in their eyes. I might be the bad guy, but them dragons were the worse guys, right? So when I wrapped my corrupting hands around the city, when I killed and maimed the gold-eyes that took exception to that, I went and got myself bumped up to good guy to this inky monk, right? Being on the side of truth, justice, and the Earth Kingdom way once, how could I go back to my criminality? Especially now that they've lifted the yoke of draconian oppression from my shoulders? Yeah, I threw some gunk in the gold-eye war machine, it's true. Helped out plenty of bugs, pigs, and goats too. Even a few 'moles got the ol' Sai Mock helping hand. But that ain't why I did none of it. Not out of love for the Earth Kingdom or hate of the Fire Nation and I ain't do it because it was the right thing to do or nothing like that. I got down in the war to make money, simple and plain. I'm going to keep getting down to make money, simple and plain.

    I can see it in their eyes, I can hear it in their voices. They think I'm going to stop. Oh yeah, they be thinking I'm their boy. I done held the city for them, kept it warm and prosperous, and now I'm fixing to just hand it on back for a medal and their gratitude. Can't they see my name and nature tattooed proud and blazing on my arms? The shine of diamonds on my neck, the glimmer of gold in my teeth? The tetsubo strapped to my back? They must be thinking that because there's a boar goring a golden dragon on my left shoulder that them same tusks won't turn on a green badgermole just as easy. I know the dragon king must recognize the catfish on my right arm, the Yasuki family done been a problem in the Fire Nation. Don't worry, my royal friend. Ain't been much love between the Yasuki and me for a few years now. What is it they say about the enemies of your enemies again?

    Hold up, I done had myself a thought. Maybe they know what I am, know I weren't planning on changing nothing but the pay-offs, and this whole ordeal is a bribe. Maybe they think they might need me after the war as much as during it. Maybe they think they can speak to me on my level and I'll listen. Maybe after they seen me play they want me on the team. Ain't unwise to keep a bad guy in your pocket just in case. Well, let me just say that I've given out my fair share of bribes, and this here? This wouldn't stop me from saying a mumblin' word. I've heard of some insultingly low bribes, spirits know I've given some insultingly low bribes, but a medallion and a thank you? Gentlemen, let's not embarrass ourselves.

    Maybe it ain't a bribe, maybe it's a little threat. They done brought a good bit of the Earth Kingdom Army and the Fire Navy out with them. Nice little show of unified force. Thinking could be I'd reconsider my errant ways in the face of the Avatar and the two biggest militaries in the world. Then again, might could be blasé to bring all this noise to these sorts of ceremonies. Or might could be they thought an uncultured sickleman, such as myself, wouldn't know what pomp and circumstance is called for. What can I say? When they're right, they're right. Don't matter no how. If they want to get bloody it just means the eel wasps out in Body Bay will eat well.

    But those are thoughts for tomorrow. Today's a celebration, ain't it?

    I've always liked to have myself a good laugh and I like other people to laugh too. I might be a gangster, but ain't no harm in sharing a hearty chuckle when you can. Everything about today is a joke, whether the silk robes standing over me espousing my virtues get it or not. I do hope one of them, an advisor, a retainer, the pretty blue-eye with them hair loopies, the Bei Fong girl, anyone really, picks up on it. It'd be a shame to have the Avatar, the Earth King, and the Fire Lord all together on the steps of a brothel thanking me for excelling at organized crime and let them get away without someone telling them why I couldn't stop smiling the whole time. This ain't no respectable Kocho Island geisha house for adulterous admirals and goatish governors neither, oh no, this here is the seediest bagnio I have. Smack in the middle of Zinatown.

    Maybe they won't get it. They all be so young, even the Earth King. Ain't no doubt he's a man, but he couldn't have more than a decade on me. Fire Lord Half-Face looks about my age, but the Avatar? Spirits alive, he's barely begun wiping himself. All so young. And they grew up so soft. A whorehouse might be, how would Jei Lin say it? "Outside of their frame of reference". Jei surely do like his words. Still, so young. Don't matter none how fancy you're born, war'll still grow you up quick.

    Now they tell us to stand and it's their turn to kneel, not near so low or so long as we, but ain't much point in arguing over degrees of bowing. Might could be nothing more than the tricks of perspective on the mind, but I can't help but disdain these supposed great men as I look down on them. My mother was born of the great Khans of the north and I've inherited my grandfathers' size. Even after we all straighten our backs I tower over them: the Earth King, the Fire Lord, the Avatar. Such big names. Such tiny men. I like that. I stand above them just as my name stands above theirs in this city. I am Sai Mock. The Mantis. The Mayor of Zinatown. The King of the Pigs. The Oni with the Iron Club. Who are they? Who are these big names with their honor and their fate? They'd be nothing if they were born on the muggy, buggy shores of the Mo Ce Sea.

    I know they be looking down their noses at me. At all of us. Even as they break bread with us. Even as they embrace us like long lost kin. I'm a parasite. I fill my coffers feeding people's demons. I'm the Blue Spirit and corruption and intimidation are my dao. They ain't see the honor in what I done. I ain't see the honor in starving virtuously. Fate for an Avatar or a Fire Lord or an Earth King be a mite different than what fate is for bastard boys from the Pig Pen. Fate for us is the bloody flux. It's beatings from Fire Nation magistrates. It's a short life and a painful death. Might could be they don't know that. Might could be they do.

    I wouldn't even pay none of that no never mind if it weren't for the hypocrisy. For all I know, they could be right about fate and honor and all that. But they ain't even got the courage of their convictions. Either what I do, don't matter how convenient it is for you and yours, is wrong and you should condemn me or what I do ain't wrong, in which case we won't have no problems and we can all sit back and make some money.

    But they won't condemn me and we will have problems. The things they be looking down on me for helped them. So they thank me. Ignore all my crimes as long as I was doing them to people they ain't like. I see them. I see through them. People like them need people like me if they want to win. I'm here for when their ideals go one way and victory goes another. I keep the dirt off their robes and they pretend not to see the blood on my hands. At least until some of that blood is theirs.

    They'll give me some time to fit myself into the new order of things. They got bigger bugs to fry. They got a world to build. And all while they be trifling with that, I'll treat their new order just as I treated the old. It's the way of things. So they'll try to stop me. I'll offer them gold or steel, same as I offer anyone. Plenty will take the gold. Plenty will feel the steel. My youth belies how well I've known both, but ain't a doubt that I prefer peace and gold to war and steel. Fate and honor ain't never took heed of my preferences before. I don't expect them to now.

    They'll be back. They'll try to push me from throne to my knees. They have to. I won't move a spirits blessed inch for them. For anyone. I refuse to.

    Let 'em come. I've stood against hurricanes. Against gangsters. Against lawmen. Against armies. The Pig Pen couldn't kill me. The Liquid Swordsman couldn't kill me. The Yasuki still can't kill me. These silk shirts won't either. I went into the Tong Wars a boy and came out a king. I am exactly who I say I am. My branches reach far and my roots run deep. I'm ready. Let 'em come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and, as ever, feedback is always appreciated.


	3. Shadows Dancing in the Night

**Shadows Dancing in the Night**

_ASC 119_

I love to savor these moments. The blood has flown, the faces have been collected, the job is finally done. And now there is peace. I'd prefer peace and quiet, but I'll take what I can get. This mission's been long and hard on everyone. It's no mean feat, plucking one of Maharaja Kshatriya's fortress-palaces off the vine and dropping it into the hands of someone a little less given to mass executions, after all. No one could deny our shadows have earned all the carousing and canoodling they can fit into a night. Let it never be said that the Order of the Chrysanthemum doesn't know how to take care of their own.

How long have we been in Citranand Mahal? I'd only shed my mask and stood in the limelight for the last few months of the final act, but some of Father Ali's people put more than a year into setting the stage for my performance. I'll have to thank them for that personally. Ali too; barely 20 and he's turned Nizari Alborz's table scraps into something worth respecting, fearing even. We'd have been in a blizzard without an igloo if not for them. Many thanks are due. But not tonight. I haven't the spare attention and I doubt anyone else has the sobriety.

My masks and Ali's thieves will drink and dance and make merry. I'll watch, but I won't join. I never do. I have my own ritual on these sacred nights. It is holier to me than Fudo to a Fire Priest.

When we do our work and do it well, when we prove ourselves the small folks' shield and sword, when we help death reach out from the dark and snatch away our oppressors, I am rewarded. Not with gold or my fellow shadowbenders' veneration, although they have been known to come as well. It is nothing so material, nothing so public. It is ethereal. It is private. It is precious to me. The tiniest piece of my old self comes back. A memory. A story. A smell. Tonight it was a sister. Her name is Buniq. She's a waterbender. I pushed her out of a canoe when I was twelve.

In the beginning, I didn't even know that I had a life before all of this. I woke up a blank slate in the Spirit World. The first memory I truly have is of my benefactor.

My hearing came first. I was born to the bone-chilling chorus of his endless legs. Sliding. Tapping. Skittering.

Then I could feel. I was adrift in a sea of cold hardness. So many of those sliding, tapping, skittering legs were on me. Too many. Pressing against my sides. Crawling up and down my arms. Stroking my face lovingly, reverentially.

After sound and sensation came sight. Black, chitinous coils held me. Twisting, screaming, silent faces pulsed within the pitiless abyss of his smooth, ebony armor. They say those cruel, pained visions will draw you in to join their vile dance if you look long enough. I looked long enough. Too long. I could feel them pulling at me. My eyes climbed up his writhing expanse when they could no longer bear the hypnotic spasms of their tortured visages.

The world was filled by his infinite, horrifying length. The walls moved endlessly on an army of his long, creeping legs. And there he was, leaning down from the top of it all. Koh the Face Stealer.

" _You've amused me, mortal. My amusements have been few and far between since you insects ended that…diverting little war of yours. And so I have given you a very singular opportunity to amuse me again. See that you don't waste it."_

I still hear his last three words ringing in my ears.  _Don't waste it_. I say them to myself in the fleeting moments of privacy during a deception. They are my mantra. My prayer.

How many years ago was that? How many faces stolen? How many lives lost?

I woke up an adult newborn in Koh's Tree of Secrets and now I sit in an ivory throne, carved into the shape of a snarling, four-headed lion, listening to Si Wongese pickpockets and my dear Faceless Ones praise my great triumph. There's a long path between those two, yet it doesn't seem it most times. She, my old self, what's left of my first life, leads me along it with shining, buried novelties as if I were a magpie-squirrel. I've been rapacious ever since she dangled the first trinket just out of my reach. All that's mattered to me, to her, to us, is holding the next piece of our past.

Yes, it's a long path and it stretches on farther still, but I, we, have barely noticed the length. Barely even noticed the road at all. Our eyes have been only for the next bauble she's left for me.

Am I just a poppyhead without an opium pipe? That flower is deity, sovereign, and lover to those who've felt its seductive breath. Am I any less enraptured than they?

When everything you do, even the face you wear, is a lie, you can either be honest with yourself or go mad. And, if I am honest, these thoughts, these questions frighten me. Just as she frightens me. Frightens me more than the Maharaja's armies and elephants. More than Koh's threats of a faceless eternity if I don't bring him his due. More than anything. It's a fear so great that only these many years of deceit and a simple, blue silk mask keep it from showing plainly on my face for all to see.

Am I nothing more than a shudra for her to move along the checkered tiles of this world and my own mind? Is it even truly my mind? There is a joy in holding a new truth you've known all along, to feel it settle into its rightful place. I lived for that. I still do. But I cannot, will not, deny that dread gnaws at the edges of my joy. Does she want to replace me? To fill me with herself until I am but a lone candle in the yawning cavern of her consciousness?

I am not the same woman that I was when I awoke in Koh's embrace. My old self was a radical. A revolutionary. She roused the rabble. She raged against a rigid, frozen society. She wanted nothing more than to melt it down and pull it, kicking and screaming, into a new age. I had no such grand intentions. I left the Spirit World a solely selfish creature, with a mind only to live another day and answer the mystery of myself. And yet the years have made me more like her. I want to do her work. Not just for what she'll give me, but for the work itself.

Am I still me? Am I, piece by piece, being devoured by her? Or are we becoming something new entirely? Does it even matter?

Does it? I can't stop. Not now. I've come too far, done too much to let go now. All I wanted was a name. My true name. To know what my mother called me, what this sister called me. To know who I am. To know who I was. They all have that. Father Ali and his thieves have that. Each of my Faceless Ones has that. All of my fellow shadowbenders in the Order of the Chrysanthemum have that. Every other wretched person crawling across this world has that. And I don't. I want it. I need it.

" _Tamen-sei! Tamen-sei!"_

A name. My name. The one my brothers and sisters gave me so many years ago. The sound of it shatters my reverie like so much glass. It's called out, brash and loud, above the revelrous tempest that fills the hall, exotically curved by a Si Wongese accent.

" _Tamen-sei! Tamen-sei!"_

Tamen-sei, Many Faces. My name, my title, over and over until the shadowbenders' mad joy fled before giddy, hushed anticipation. Ali stands and raises his cup, running over with sweet, potent tej, high in another toast. It'll be his third, if you're only counting the ones he's dedicated to me. How many he's given if you include those to our nominal host, Jeong Jeong, as well as several new "habeebis" he's made tonight and the three women, and one thoroughly confused fire ferret, with whom he's fallen in hopeless love over the course of the evening is beyond all reckoning.

" _Tamen-sei! Tamen-sei!"_

I wonder if he knows that he got me. I've stood up to torture and temptation in the midst of operations deeper than the ocean, but it's simply hearing a false name spoken by a true friend that breaks my façade. My mind and stomach were already roiling with dark thoughts and sake. His voice tipped the balance and shattered my composure with my reverie. He left me naked and weak. He stripped me of all pretense. He pulled my truest thoughts out of my head and splattered them across my face with all the subtlety of a butcher. A mask, my simplest and oldest, of plain, blue silk is my only defense. My champion. My savior.

Sitting in this throne, raised above the frolicking and feuding of Citranand Mahal's massive feast hall and alone but for the furious, ivory lions' heads, I look down on them all. The Queen of Shadows. Invincible and imperious, untouchable and aloof. Do they know that I look down with envy? Do they know that I would cast off these thoughts and these questions that turn my stomach and set ice to my spine in a moment to join them? I see them lost in joy, lost in drink, lost in camaraderie and I would join them. But…I cannot. I have a ritual. I have a duty to my sister, to know her as I once did all those years ago. My sister who I pushed out of a canoe. My sister who I pulled, shivering and mumbling, from the frigid, black sea. My sister whose side I wouldn't, couldn't, leave until she was warm in our hut and the healers told us she'd live. My beautiful big sister, Buniq.

My old family is in my head and my new one is down there, dancing amongst murals of charging gaja. I can see them all from here. Every eye in the room is for Ali. They cheer and guffaw at his slurred exultations with their cups raised in unanimous approval. All except for Jeong Jeong. His eyes are mine and mine alone.

Jeong Jeong, that fierce, whiskered dragon. Of every man and woman here, he's known me the longest. A decade and more. I met him when he still fought to help the Earth King take the country back from the very rebels he's now counted amongst. Before he was branded a warlord and traitor. Before the Night of Endless Light. Before the massacre.

Back then, he needed favors he couldn't be heard asking for and my past self demanded guilty blood for answers to my questions. This friendship started off a matter of convenience and payment, it truly did, but what can I say? These things grow. Give it time and who knows what might happen? Maybe we'll give each other a word of advice, a word of friendship, on occasion. Maybe Jeong Jeong's ships will help smuggle our shadows places they oughtn't be. Maybe I'll take Citranand Mahal, the pin that holds province Paurava in place, from the Maharaja and drop it into Jeong Jeong's lap.

Even deep in his cups and surrounded by friends and his own lieutenants he looks as grim and dour as ever. Come now, you old puma-goat, we gave you a fortress-palace, can't you give us a smile? No, no smile, just a simple, raised eyebrow while his gold eyes hold my grays. He doesn't have ask the question that goes with that snowy, expectant eyebrow. He doesn't have to. We've known each other too long to waste time with such formalities.

Too long indeed. He knows that I want to leave my throne to join my brothers and sisters. He knows why I cannot. And yet that thrice-damned, implacable eyebrow still asks me why I won't. So the question is left hanging between us. Fat and silent. Unasked and unanswered.

Oh, he knows, but he'll never understand. How can anyone understand the burden of owing a forgotten lifetime to someone who was once as precious as the sweet air to them until they've felt the weight of it pressing down on their own shoulders?

I owe tonight to her and to myself as well. She is my sister. She braided my hair and snuck me extra sea prunes when mom wasn't looking. She was kindly and vivacious. There was always a joke, a scheme, an adventure with her. I loved her more than words could show. I still do.

I loved her and she, too full of laughter by half, loved life. I haven't known her for even a full day yet, but I know that if she was with us, she'd have long since thrown herself to the celebration below. She'd be with Ali now with her cup in hand, stumbling through praises and promises of eternal love and friendship. If she was here with us, I would be there with her and we would be lost together in these dear, delirious moments. If only she were here with us.

Perhaps…perhaps it wouldn't be a betrayal to set her aside for now, for a night, and join my new family. The sister I knew wouldn't blame me, she wouldn't fault me. No, she'd just  _tut-tut_ , as was always her way, at me waiting this long on her behalf already and wave me on with a roguish grin that's every bit as implacable as either of Jeong Jeong's eyebrows.

My first step down the wide, stone steps goes all but unnoticed. The next draws a few glances. By the time I'm halfway to the floor every eye had joined Jeong Jeong's. I raise my cup to match Ali's and every one of my brothers' and sisters' took to the air to match mine.

"Friends, comrades, shadowbenders, we have won. We stand victorious, our oppressors lie dead, and now: we drink!"

Tomorrow, sister, I promise. Tomorrow, we'll walk through these new memories of old days together and hold each other tight, wrapped in furs by the fire, like in New Moon Celebrations past. Tomorrow.


End file.
